At a weekend science camp in the remote village of Bautista, Philippines, the faces of students at Coloscaoyan National High School quickly changed from skepticism to excitement when they realized ...

Examine the set of graphs below for a given city. Read carefully the temperature and precipitation scales on the graphs. Review the biome information. Two biome choices are given for each set of ...

Since its launch in February 2013, Landsat 8 has collected about 400 scenes of the Earth’s surface per day. Each of these scenes covers an area of about 185 by 185 kilometers (115 by 115 miles)—34,200 ...

Update on October 30, 2024: This Landsat image shows ghost forests in North Carolina. Congratulations to Eric JF Kleijssen for being the first reader to identify the location. Read more about the area ...

The Sun provides the energy that drives Earth’s climate, but not all of the energy that reaches the top of the atmosphere finds its way to the surface. That’s because aerosols—and clouds seeded by ...

The time it takes carbon to move through the fast carbon cycle is measured in a lifespan. The fast carbon cycle is largely the movement of carbon through life forms on Earth, or the biosphere. Between ...

Just as the incoming and outgoing energy at the Earth’s surface must balance, the flow of energy into the atmosphere must be balanced by an equal flow of energy out of the atmosphere and back to space ...

In 1967 Hansen went to work for NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York City, where he continued his research on planetary problems. Around 1970, some scientists suspected Earth was ...

Among the first things the data revealed was a definite seasonal difference in cloudiness over the polar regions. Cloud fraction (the fraction of the area in a map’s grid box covered by cloud) over ...

All of this extra carbon needs to go somewhere. So far, land plants and the ocean have taken up about 55 percent of the extra carbon people have put into the atmosphere while about 45 percent has ...

Lindsey Doermann joined Earth Observatory as a science writer in 2023. She is a former editor and writer for Conservation and Anthropocene magazines, covering environmental science and solutions.

How far can dust travel? Where does it come from? Explore the answers to these questions and make a model of how dust affects sky visibility in Dust a True World Traveler.